Where Were You Before the Tree of Life?
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Where Were You Before the Tree of Life? The true history of the darkness and of the Light Volume 1 By Peter R. Farley For the Spiritual Hierarchy, with love and gratitude Vols 2-5 available through http://4truthseekers.com/treeoflife and for newer articles http://www.cosmologies.com/treeoflife/ 2 Chapter 1 - The Tree of Life: Archetypes, Metaphors, and Illusion The Tree of Life is a common metaphorical image in the mythology of just about every country and race on Earth, in one form or another. It is an archetype. Although its meaning seems to vary from place to place, its central role in such cultural traditions as the maypole and many religious practices, seems to be ubiquitous. How widespread most of these archetypes are, is startling, in and of itself. Renowned writer and culturist Joseph Campbell tried, in his work, to explain the existence and origins of such archetypal images. His major source of explanation for the commonality of these archetypes seemed to revolve around ‘independent invention’ rather than what he liked to term ‘diffusion.’ What Campbell referred to as archetypes are such things as sleeping dreams, death, rebirth, a child who becomes a savior, virgin birth, the idea of a sacred world mountain, the great goddess, time as a cyclical thing, the axis mundi or world axis, primeval waters, the serpent, certain kinds of sacrifice, an awakening, and even something as simple as the lotus blossom. These are things which can be found commonly in so many myths and legends, not to mention cultural and religious histories, as well as on an individual level as well. Robert Segal boils down Campbell’s work to the all-engrossing question lying at its very heart, and one that is also very vital to our own forthcoming research into the very nature of archetypes in our history. He asks, Are these mythical images that we see all around us, the archetypes themselves, or are they simply symbols that seek to represent the original archetype themselves? Campbell’s idea of independent invention suggests that each culture came up with an archetype such as the Tree of Life on its own. This means they were not in any way, shape or form, borrowed from another culture or influence. He argues that there could be two possible explanations for this coincidence. The first is heredity, which to Campbell is the most likely explanation. The second is experience. Heredity being that a certain image once formulated within a cultural or religious group of some kind, is then handed down from elder to younger and thus multiplies and divides its influence with that group itself. If it were experience from which these archetypal images spread, that would mean that each race or culture that has the Tree of Life in its mythology, has actually somewhere in its dim distant past, had an actual experience of something that anyone would commonly recognize or logically symbolize as a Tree of Life. This could have been in a physically wakened state, or in a an archetypal dream shared by many in the culture. Dreams are a central storage depot for many religious visions and images. Campbell placed a lot of importance on dreams. Devoid of an “effective general mythology in our immediate society,” each one us will resort to his own “private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams” to create for ourselves our own system of mythological ideas and metaphors. As we walk down the street, “the latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this very afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” 3 Psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, who founded the analytical school of psychology, was one of Campbell’s mentors. For Jung, however, only inherited causes could be archetypal. Campbell uses the term far more loosely in his interpretations by suggesting that even acquired causes can also be archetypal. By archetypes, both Campbell and Jung, mean not just recurrent mythological subjects but ones that also both stir emotion and propel behavior. Political emblems and symbols of national pride such as the Bear for Russia or the Bald Eagle for the Unites States are the most common examples of these. Each city, state and region within the United States goes out of its way to have a state flower, a city motto, something that stirs the emotions with regard to that particular geographical location or region. Campbell went on to formulate the idea that all myths and epics are linked in that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need of the human psyche to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. He proposes that archetypes are the releasers of what directly prompt emotions and actions in animals: innate releasing mechanisms . An example of this might be ‘the golden arches of McDonald’s’ that now serve to open some innate doorway to our feeling of being hungry, whether, in truth, we are hungry or not. Archetypes then are triggers that activate innate releasing mechanisms, which in turn are triggers that activate emotions and actions. Like keys to locks that open doors, archetypes are keys that trigger responses that then unlock deep-seated needs and desires within each and every one of us. Yet archetypes themselves need to be activated, and it has to be some form of concrete symbol that is the trigger that activates them. The most famous example of this is Pavlov’s dog salivating at the ringing of a bell. With humans, a certain piece of music, a smell, a touch, or especially a certain symbol within our sight, can all be triggers that open inner doorways to our psyche, allowing our emotions and thoughts to be manipulated, once these defenses are down. The advertising and marketing industries that now seek to control all our consumer spending habits, knows how to target us with just such trigger-realizing mechanisms—a logo, a jingle, a slogan, all are triggers meant to stimulate our complex emotional needs and push us toward spending our acquired energies in the form of money, on something the advertiser and marketer want to sell. Archetypes are central to this book, and the concrete symbols which invoke them are a key element to understanding the power religions, political parties, secret societies, and other such control groups exert over each and every one of us. In The Mythic Image , as in others of his books, Campbell compares myths to dreams, saying that both come from the deep unconscious side of our beings: His argument is, briefly, that through dreams a door is opened to mythology. Since myths are of the nature of a dream, dreams arising from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do then myths arise from that very same inward world of the unknown. Whether the unconscious is full of acquired ideas or inherited ones, Campbell does not like to say, though he contends that myths, like dreams, are a) composed less of plots than of images; b) have a logic of their own; and c) can only be experienced, never truly be analyzed. In explaining the similarities among myths, however, Campbell downplays the importance of independent invention under which the unconscious falls, and focuses himself instead on diffusion. 4 The psychological and metaphysical functions of myth would then seem to prevent them from having a social function as well. If myth serves to reconnect humans with their severed selves it operates devoid of any connection to the workings of life. If this were the case, and myth serves to reconnect humans with the cosmos as a whole, it either trivializes or outright seems to dissolve any distinction between humans and anything else as well, including fellow humans. Campbell does say in one of his works (Magic) that myth deals with society, at least to some extent. Social problems he admits, stem from psychological ones, from the failure to tend to the unconscious: “ . every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance . .” How the rediscovery of a severed part of either humans or the cosmos would abet one socially, Campbell does not say. Campbell argues that the individualism espoused by creative mythology renders impossible the fulfillment of the third social function of myth as well as the second one, having a logic of their own, and never truly being able to be analyzed. He says he finds it impossible to believe that the ways of any one society are divinely sanctioned by mythology As one of society’s proclaimed experts on mythology and archetypes, Campbell’s ideas reflect the tendency, as do most or all of our experts in the scientific, left-brained world that we live in, to espouse a philosophy that some things can never, and almost should never, be known. Often it comes to the point where it is almost a criminal act for us to try, let alone to say that we do know or perceive answers that come from unscientific personal experience or from beyond the physical plane of existence.. Where and when then could the common experience, group image or mass-vision of the Tree of Life have occurred in history that would have allowed each and every race to have it as one of their inherited images? That is a question this book seeks to answer. Take a look at this creation story from the Wapangwa people of Tanzania who have a Creation story making use of the theme of what is called excretory creation, though still centered, as are so many, around a Tree of Life.